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Read our latest Newsletter.
The Union • Other Voices
September 27, 2007
Local Food and Local People
I stood at the center of our farm one day this past week and delighted in the sound of Sandhill Cranes migrating south, adding their calls to the increasingly long list of unmistakable signs that Fall has come.
Some of those signs are not as noticeable as the maple trees on West Broad Street, but signal nonetheless the changes taking place all around us: customers at the Farmers' Market now asking for potatoes, birds singing and flocking together while gathering sunflower seeds from our hedgerows at the farm, chard and kale rejuvenated by the cool nighttime temperatures.
As the close of the farm season approaches we pick and pack what remains of summer, but we too are more likely to think about hearty dinners of fresh tomato sauce or cabbage and potatoes. The relative ease of work this time of year and the cool temperatures leave us with enough ambition at the end of the day to stand over a hot stove and relish the fruits of our labor. Knowing all too well the hard work that will be demanded of us when we clear the fields to prepare them for winter, we're pausing to take a deep breath and letting some things go for the time being.
What we don't let go of, however, is the sense of how fortunate we are to live and work in this community. However much you've heard and read about the nationwide resurgence of small farms and interest in eating locally, small farms are an anachronism in today's increasingly global corporate economy, and their survival from year to year and longevity beyond the life of their current farmer is far from certain.
What assurance there is amounts to one thing: after we grow the food, someone has to want it. When we at the farm think about this past season, we don't stop and linger long over the weather we've had, the lack of pests, the quality of the soil or other things that, knock on wood, we're able to take somewhat for granted. We do think, most of all, about the wonderful people whom we've met this past season at our farm's farmstand or at the Farmers' Markets who have said that they do want the food we have grown.
In particular, we think of each of the individuals and families that joined our CSA as subscribers and, on faith, supported our farm through this past season in exchange for a box of fresh, organic produce and helped us find our way one season closer to making Riverhill Farm a lasting part of this community.
And therein lies the greatest pleasure of all: people are what make the difference, young, old, and everything in between. Young mothers and fathers arrive at the farm with children of all ages. They stop and linger at the farmstand to talk while their children forage in the strawberries.
The children wear their happiness on their stained lips and shirts. One child viewed the farm this Spring from a Snugli; this week she delighted us as she splashed through the first rain puddles of winter in her new rubber boots. A man brings his frail, elderly mother to the farm and slowly walks with her, arm in arm, down a row of tomatoes so that she can choose the ones she wants.
A local folksinger leaves the farm with a bag of the hottest peppers we grow and tells us the next week when we see him at the coffee shop how he prepared them. Strangers sit with one another and exchange their parents' or grandparents' recipe for pickles. A poet buys basil to make enough pesto to last the winter; he returns to the Farmers' Market the next week just to thank us for the quality and offers us one of his books in thanks. A schoolteacher comes each Saturday to help us pick and brings us homemade coffeecake; when it rained this past week she brought a hot dish of enchiladas to sustain us through a cold day's picking.
At the most basic level, people smile and take pleasure in something as simple as the fragrance of a ripe melon we've grown. For us, it's the smile we remember most and for that, we give thanks.
ooo
Alan Haight farms with his partner, Jo McProud, at Riverhill Farm in Nevada City. Go to localfoodcoalition.org for more information about Nevada County agriculture, or to Riverhillfarm.com about Riverhill's CSA, farmstand, and farmers' market locations. |
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